


you were the brightest of us

by Aroundthepen (keithkohgane)



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: it's not really that shippy but like i mean come on nothing can not be shippy with these two, just a fair warning, ummmmmmm so major angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 12:17:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6906850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keithkohgane/pseuds/Aroundthepen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>what is one supposed to do when the stars go out?</p>
            </blockquote>





	you were the brightest of us

**Author's Note:**

> this took a lot out of me if i'm being honest. grief is hard. but hopefully i break a few hearts along with mine.

_the moon is a cold light_ \- blindsided; bon iver

* * *

 

The funeral is held five days later.

There is a quiet stillness in her. Something like tiredness but not quite as human.

If not for the hard wood of the church pew against her back Marinette would think she’s still back at the hospital. She can still smell it, so distinctly sterile and horrifying. The bright lights, the way the seats in the waiting room always seemed to get less comfortable, the smiling nurses. It all lives in her head, still there as if time had stopped the moment she stepped foot in the lobby.

She remembers her words, to him. One of only two precious moments she had stolen with him.

 _You can’t leave,_ she’d said. _We’re not done yet._

She pushes the backs of her feet into the kneeling board, trying to take herself out of her mind. She scrunches her desert-dry eyes until they sting and opens them again, making herself pay attention to what’s real.

Why the funeral is being held in a church, she doesn’t know. To her knowledge, neither he nor Mr Agreste are religious. She is sitting in the first row, next to the aisle. Alya’s warmth is pressed into her side, and pressed into hers is Nino. She can feel their breaths, loud and shaky and pulsing. _Alive, alive, alive._

It is a small affair in a big church, but even then it can’t seem to hold the smoky grief that bears down on the pews. Only the eight five pews have been filled, people whose sadness is a tangible thing, not an imagined one.

(It is not enough. The world is not weeping for its lost sun.)

She looks down at her clasped hands. They’re too sweaty. Her palms slip over the skirt of her dress as she tries to dry them, so she scrunches the black fabric in between her fingers to soak up all traces of moisture. She watches as the skirt wrinkles, ruining the fine ironing job her mother had done this morning.

She observes it detachedly, the ruination of her clothes hardly causing a ripple in her.

She sits patiently, waiting for it to do something. Waiting for something to happen other than time passing. Waiting for despair, or crushing sadness, or aching loss, or... anything, really. Anything other than this uneasy calm that sits like a thick blanket over everything in her heart, in her chest; almost suffocating in its very wholeness. It’s almost as though something is wrong with her. Very, very wrong.

Something vital was torn from her the day he passed, ripped from under her skin, her muscles, and now she doesn’t know how to feel.

Something in her has stopped. Her life has been in some sort of stasis for the last while. She hasn’t been out on a city patrol in the last eight days either. She hasn’t seen Chat Noir, hasn’t been able to tell him she’s sorry for going M.I.A. There hasn’t been an akuma for them to fight. He must be worried.

 _Shirking your duties for a boy,_ buginette _,_   _how romantic,_ he says in her mind. _Maybe you can do the same for me one day._

She ignores him.

Her hands squeeze into tight fists, knuckles turning white, stark against their dark background. She twists them until they’re entirely swathed in the skirt. The hem cuts into her thighs but she doesn’t feel it as sharply as she should. The sight of it blurs around the edges, and she smells alcohol hand gel, sees blue painted doors, her words ( _We love you_ )—

A dark hand covers one of hers. It gently pulls her fingers from the folds of black and smooths out her stiff fingers before slipping its own into the spaces between. That hand is shaking.

However, with Alya’s hand in hers, reality refocuses around Marinette. The church seems to materialise around her. The rows and rows of mahogany pews, the great ivory columns, a matching arching ceiling, gilded with gold. Singing voices she can’t describe as anything less than angelic reverberate in the enormous room and she watches as the priest on the altar stands solemnly behind a podium, continuing with the sermon when the choir finishes.

She can’t tell if she does it purposefully or not when she blocks out his words. Her eyes rove over the entire altar until they settle on the simple coffin that sits just in front. It seems too big for the eighteen year old boy it holds. A light oak, it is expensive and tasteful. If one can describe a coffin as tasteful.

The thought stirs a ripple of discomfort in Marinette’s calm. The image of him flashes bright and painful in front of her eyes. The needles, the tight, white bandages, the tube in his throat that pushed air in and out of his lungs. His skin was pale and smooth, save the red slices along his cheeks, the grazes on his forehead. His eyes seemed sunken, petal bruises on the delicate skin under them. The gold of his hair was still beautiful, still fresh sunlight. She almost couldn’t recognise him.

( _What happened to you?_ )

She moves her attention elsewhere.

The platinum blond of Gabriel Agreste’s hair from across the aisle catches her eye. He is fading, pale skin and bruised eyes bandaged in Italian black silk. The sight is strange after days of seeing him on the white background of hospital corridors.

He still hasn’t divulged the details of the accident.

His head turns a fraction as if sensing her gaze, but he doesn’t look over. His face is drawn; a broken man.

Annoyance prickles in her chest, remembering how he had not allowed more than one visit. She might shove it away and down, but she’s not sure if she does it on purpose or not. Her emotions aren’t working right today.

The service passes as time does lately: in a wobbly, non-linear way. Nathalie gives a eulogy. Clipped and cold and blunt. It seems all the harsher for the ragged edge of her voice, despite the neutral and clichéd words. It scratches at the suffocating blanket of quiet in Marinette’s chest.

Only when Alya’s hand readjusts its grip in hers a time later does she realise that the service is over. Just like that, it seems. Nothing special, nothing very particular, nothing stranger than quiet sniffling echoing in the vastness. A ceremony without ceremony.

The pallbearers step forward and hoist the coffin on their shoulders, passing right by them. Close enough to touch. They wait for the immediate family to follow.

There’s a jagged intake of breath and Marinette turns her attention to Nino, sitting on Alya’s other side. His eyes are red and puffy, tears flowing freely, a mirror of his girlfriend. She watches Alya kiss the back of his hand, still locked in hers, and wishes for just a moment that she was so cut open, so rough and bleeding, that she might feel like how they look.

Her own state of being is beginning to trouble her, an unsettling itch starting somewhere in the depths of her stomach. It squeezes up to her chest, constricting her ribcage until her breath comes out a little short.

Cradling her purse in one hand and pulling Alya and Nino up with her other, Marinette rises to follow the procession. They are behind Nathalie, Chloé, and Gabriel. And the coffin. The varnished wood gleams, cold and impersonal.

Nino and Alya hug themselves tighter to her and to each other so that the three of them become one strange, lumpy creature of grief following their best friend to his grave. A hole his size opens between them all no matter how hard they press together.

( _We’re a family._ )

The air becomes suddenly too thick to breathe. Her lungs can’t seem to fill with enough of it and an unease bleeds into her calm. The collar of her dress is too close for comfort. When they make it out the doors of the church, Marinette breathes deeply and gratefully, trying to force the oxygen in and out of her lungs.

Disquietude, but still no panic. Dizziness, but not disorientation. Nothing she can describe without using the word mild in front. She’s merely on the brink of it, the only one who doesn’t seem to have fallen over the edge.

The sky is gray and sunless, full of clouds, but they don’t threaten rain. There is no wind and the air is cool. Not a sad day. A lifeless one.

Alya squeezes her fingers in solidarity and leads the three of them back to the Dupain-Cheng’s car. They avoid the small crowd of people milling around, talking, hugging, crying. Marinette’s parents are there, waiting for them. Her father cries during the drive to the cemetery. So does Alya, Nino. Her mother’s voice, when she speaks, is meek and stained with sadness.

“That was a beautiful ceremony,” she says. She’s lying, they all know it. There was nothing beautiful about it.

Marinette leans her head on the cool glass of the window. The seat belt pushes against her chest. It presses the ring in her cardigan pocket into her ribs and she finds herself dipping her fingers into it to catch it. She leans back into the seat to look at it, the smooth, plain silver.

She remembers how it looked on his finger, long and musical. She remembers how it felt against the skin of her shoulder, the crease of her elbow, brushing against the back of her hand.

It wasn’t on his finger in the hospital, a thin strip of white skin the only evidence it was there at all. The next day, it had fallen from Mr Agreste’s hand onto the floor of the hospital waiting room where she, Nino, and Alya had been refused another visit by him. The ring had clattered dully against the linoleum, right into the arch of her foot. She’d looked up to see him notice but he’d already turned and gone back to the room that was forbidden from them. Planning on giving it back to him when he woke up, she’d pocketed the ring.

Chat’s voice had been in her head again. _Stealing,_ ma Lady _? Not very righteous of you._

Staring at it now, it does little to provoke much of a reaction in her. She probes her emotions, trying to find something. Rubs her eyes until they sting, forcing them to water. Tries to find something more, _anything more_.

(There is nothing more.)

The drive is short and the walk to the hole in the ground is shorter. Alya keeps a tight hold on Nino and Marinette as they stand by the grave. The coffin sits on two wooden beams above the perfectly dug rectangular hole. Someone says something, but Marinette has gone back to not hearing.

Her unease begins to crumble as she stares at the coffin, giving way to something more hollow, more rattling. But just a touch of it, not enough for the occasion. She watches as they lower the coffin into the ground and it pulls whatever energy she has left with it. There is no room to feel alive, no space for a healthy, throbbing heart.

The air gets thick again.

When the three of them walk away again, that slow, lumpy creature of grief, Marinette feels them all pulling their hearts apart and leaving pieces behind. A bloody mess of still-beating flesh on the still-freshly-turned earth.

( _Promise me you won’t leave._ )

***

That night is the first of empty tears. They fall silently and quickly, and she doesn’t notice them until her mother gently wipes her palms over Marinette’s cheeks and pulls her into a hug. Her mother cries. Her father scoops them into the safety of his arms, resting his chin on Marinette’s head.

Her eyes catch on a framed photograph, bursting with four laughing faces. His is the brightest, always the brightest. His hair glints gold, his smile matching.

( _Smile for me. Please._ )

All too suddenly, in that moment, their grief becomes too much, too loud, too real, and her knees give.

It’s too heavy for her to bear on tired shoulders. Exhaustion, built up from days in the hospital waiting room, days waiting for the funeral, days waiting for her heart to stir, crashes down in her body and her strength leaves her in a hollow exhale.

Her parents follow her to the floor, and they become a tangle of hot tears and clumsy, stroking fingers.

Tears fall steadily from Marinette’s eyes but still, they don’t sting.

***

The next night she goes out to patrol the city.

Amidst the fuzziness of her emotions, of time, of everything around her, Marinette remembers this. It feels wrong, to continue with one’s duties and responsibilities after death. But the world is not hers, after all.

Tikki hasn’t spoken since he died, and not a word leaves her now. Marinette’s own voice is croaky from disuse, but those little magic words come naturally as breathing.

She checks her yoyo for messages from Chat Noir, but her inbox is empty. She sends her own, apologising and letting him know that she’s back now. Business as usual.

And then she’s off. Her feet hardly touch the roof tiles as she runs, swings, zips all over the Paris skyline. She flies over buildings and under bridges, keen eyes searching for danger. But it seems the city has gone as quiet as she has. There seems to be less traffic around, the lights shine a little less brightly, the hum of life is faded.

She reaches the Eiffel Tower in no time, settling on the metal beams to wait for Chat. An hour passes, two. Half the night’s life has passed. Her idleness is unsettling her, and she finds herself getting short of breath the less she can find something to distract herself.

She swings upside down on the beams, stretches her muscles to their limit, even races herself going up and down the tower. She checks her yoyo again and sends Chat Noir a message asking if he’s okay. After another little while she resigns herself to the fact that he won’t be coming.

After her five days of no contact or activity, she can’t begrudge him one night’s break. It isn’t like him not to have told her, but then again, it isn’t like her not to have told him either. She can forgive him.

She waits a little longer for him before she leaves the tower. She goes on a slow patrol, checking every last nook and cranny in every street and alley. She pretends Chat Noir is with her as she goes, talking and joking and keeping her company. She combs the city for danger, and maybe a little for her partner hoping he might decide to turn up. Paris is getting lonely and the night is fading to morning, tendrils of sunlight wrapping around buildings.

Marinette watches the sun rise and marvels absentmindedly at how she never felt tired. Not the sleep sort of tired anyway.

She turns to go home when a strange movement catches her eye. She pauses and watches as the panels of a billboard is stripped of its vinyl advertisement.

It’s his face they’re folding up. His smirk, the one that has become so mischievous, crumples, and for the first time in a week she feels something.

It starts in her toes as she swings clumsily over to watch the workers do their job. A deadness that buckles her knees and travels up her arms, rendering them utterly useless. She feels it punching a hole right through her chest, right through the unbearable hollowness, stealing her lungs, and leaving a gaping maw of a wound that is impossibly more unbearable.

A weak sound escapes her lips and she is powerless as they take him away from her.

One last flash of teeth and he is gone.

Before she can stuff it away, the memory of the first time she’d seen the photograph rushes into that space in her chest like flames, licking at the raw edges of the hole.

He was in Vogue. She’d picked the magazine up that morning on her way to school but hadn’t had a chance to read it until lunch.

Alya had noticed the smirk first.

“What is _that_?” she’d said, snatching the magazine from Marinette’s hands and prompting Nino to settle his head next to hers in Marinette’s lap despite her noise of protest.

Marinette had rolled her eyes and let her take the magazine, settling back into the roots of the tree they’d claimed. The four of them were lounging on the grass in the park, drinking in the day’s sun.

He hadn’t replied at first, engrossed in his own book, and Marinette had poked her finger into his ribs to get his attention. He’d yelped in surprise, sticking his tongue out in response to her grin.

“What is what?” he’d asked.

Four years into their friendship and they were comfortable as anything together. Sometimes, she liked to marvel at it, at how easily they fit together. She wasn’t nervous anymore and he wasn’t so reserved. She was privy to his secret smiles, his warm, friendly hands, his terrible jokes. She would hear him laugh regularly when before it was a rare luxury to hear the sound.

To have him pressed into her, shoulders-hips-knees, his breath on her cheek, was no longer something she wished for, but something that was real and present. And now, even if she had lingering, half-buried feelings that kept her falling in love with him, they are first and foremost friends.

Alya pointed to his face on one of the pages. “ _That_.”

Marinette looked more closely at it. His lips were pulled up on one side, his eyes half-lidded, and his chin expertly tilted to give off an air of perfectly smooth playfulness. He’d had _devilry_ written all over him and it was such a jarringly foreign yet piercingly familiar expression that Marinette’s heart had very nearly stopped. She almost smelled the leather.

“A photo shoot,” he’d said.

He said it offhanded, like a passing fact of life, but Marinette had been watching him. He’d blushed. It was so faint and the dappled sunlight through the trees made it hard to see, but she was certain of it. Her confusion deepened.

“Don’t you sass me, Agreste,” Alya scoffed. “Where did you learn to smile like that? That is not an innocent daddy’s boy smile in the slightest.”

“She’s right, bro,” Nino grinned. “That’s a smile for swashbuckling rogues and suave womanisers. I’m pretty sure you’ve caused a fair amount of swooning already.”

“Nino—”

“Quick, Marinette, call the police. We’ve found the reason for the fainting spell that has fallen over Paris—”

He’d turned to Marinette, unable to keep from smiling at Nino’s teasing. “Please help me.”

“You’re on your own here,” she told him, laughing at his mock-betrayed expression.

He took her hand. “You can’t let them tease me like this. What happened to best friends?”

His wide green eyes had swallowed her whole in that moment. She remembers because his blush hadn’t left his cheeks and his look had seemed a little deeper than the situation called for and for once she couldn’t fool herself into thinking she isn’t madly, deeply, hopelessly in love with him.

Alya smacked him upside the head with the magazine. “Adrien, please shut up.”

It broke the moment and they all dissolved into laughter. She forgot all about the smirk and black leather. Until of course, she’d seen it replicated on a different boy, a different dearest friend.

Chat Noir had stood by the very same billboard that now stares out at the city empty, exaggerating the pose and perfectly replicating that winning smirk. His laugh had lit up the night. She’d playfully pushed him off the roof and ignored the warmth blooming in her chest.

Now, Marinette clings to the memory of that sunny afternoon, even as its jagged edges cut into her mess of a heart. She gasps—or cries—or both—she can’t tell, and waits for her heaving lungs to slow. The night closes in on her, the dark, choking and unyielding.

Here is the crack, the break in her heart. Here, seven days of waiting drop like anvils on her back. Here, her tears stain the roof and her sobs stain the air.

Her chest tears open anew, the fresh wound is fresher still. There are parts of her dying while the rest of her watches, so very alive. Daggers slip through her ribs and stab at everything vital in her, and she bleeds.

He’s gone.

Marinette yearns for Chat Noir, for his easy comfort. She wishes she could just talk to him, break down in his arms.

Instead, she turns for home.

Making it there is almost impossible, and it is only with Tikki’s gentle guidance of her senses that she manages it at all.

Tikki spends the night tucked into Marinette’s neck as she sobs on her bed, curled up on her side. Her soothing humming is the first noise she’s made in days and it lulls Marinette to an uneasy, hiccoughing sleep.

***

After that, sleep mostly eludes her.

Every night she lays there, tosses, turns, tries everything to fall into the mercy of unconsciousness, but it doesn’t work. Alya comes over some nights, and it’s a little easier. Feeling her body beside her in the bed is a comfort she latches onto, and it soothes her enough to give her a few hours of sleep. She has to go on patrol after Alya falls asleep, but it’s not so bad.

When they’re not in Marinette’s house they’re at Nino’s, coaxing food into him and tugging him from his laptop and into his bed. Of the three of them, he has reacted the most explosively. He was the one to get in a shouting match with Mr Agreste at the hospital, cursing him for not letting them see their friend more than once for an hour. Now, his shoulders are perpetually tensed and his words are harsh. He’s a shadow of himself, quick to rise and angrier than Marinette has ever seen him. And unlike Alya and Marinette, he hasn’t gone back to school.

Marinette doesn’t blame him. The school echoes too loudly of grief right now. She has so many emotions brimming inside her that the onslaught of everyone else’s feels like too much. She can hardly stand it. It puts her on edge, makes his loss too real, somehow.

She watches herself grow to be an unpleasant person to be around. She watches people avoiding her in class, in the corridors. She watches the teachers’ efforts to include her in class diminish. It hurts too.

It’s not that she’s doing it on purpose exactly, or that she’s trying to push them away, but she has so much anger crammed in with her other emotions, and it’s the most volatile one, always ready to emerge first with its head rearing. Adrien’s death was not only an accident but Mr Agreste still hasn’t told them what kind of accident it was, and there is nothing for her to blame. So she blames everything.

She’s less explosive than Nino, but her anger has more of a bite to it. It flows like poison in her veins that stings more and more each time she lashes out, each time she sees the flicker of hurt or indignation in the eyes of whichever loved one has dared come close enough to ask after her.

No matter how hard she tries, she can’t seem to stop.

She can’t work through the tangled mess of emotions inside her. The new acquisitions and all the ones she had from before. She was in love with him and she loved him and now that love has nowhere to go. It’s locked in her chest, burning like rubbing alcohol on her wounded heart.

Anger is easier than grief. It is easier to use anger to pretend to be strong. It is easier to be angry than it is to let grief empty her. She wraps this anger around her like an armour, as if it can protect her from everyone else’s and her her grief alike.

This plan is almost foiled by none other than Chloé Bourgeois.

Of everyone’s grief that haunts the school, Chloé’s is the loudest. She has turned to steel; vicious and sharp and deadly. She does not speak but the cold metal of her demeanour sucks the warmth from the air. It cuts at Marinette’s armour, sapping the heat from her anger, a freezing reminder of the boy who was warm enough to melt her.

She thinks of how much harder it must be for her. No one told her about the accident when it happened, and that must have hurt more than Marinette can imagine. She, Nino, and Alya were lucky to get to see him the once that they were allowed, but at least they knew a few hours after it happened. They were able to spend those three days in the hospital waiting room, begging for more time.

 _We’re his family!_ they’d pleaded.

Gabriel Agreste is not a generous man. _I am his family. I am the only family that matters._

Chloé hadn’t heard until the obituary was published in the paper.

Eventually, Marinette tries to ignore her heartbreak. She spends her days pretending to listen to teachers and listening to Alya. Together, they wait for Nino to be okay enough to come back. There is none of the strict seating plan of collège in the lycée with everyone in different classes, but his is another space that the two of them can’t fill on their own.

Another constant reminder of what is lost.

They seem to be everywhere. The physics classroom where he came alive in the morning, the gym hall where he was the best fencer they had. Marinette finds his presence in the places she didn’t know she associated with him.

The dusty corner of the library where no one could hear the two of them laughing because no one went there anyway. He kept joining her there, even though he had regular sneezing fits. The bench he and Nino liked to sit on in the morning as they waited for class to start, falling asleep on each others’ shoulders because they’d been up all night playing video games.

Even when she goes home, she can’t seem to escape him. He is on the kitchen counter where he sat as he watched her make éclairs for the two of them. She can hardly go into her own bathroom because of the time she’d had to bandage his bleeding hand and a few drops still stain the bath mat. He’d cut himself picking up the shards of a lamp she’d broken and she’d taken him to the bathroom to patch him up. She doesn’t quite remember what they were talking about, but she knows they ended up on the floor, clutching their sides in laughter.

She can’t move but there he is. She hadn’t noticed him bleeding into her whole life, and now she is just as stained as that dratted bath mat.

The only relief she can find is her patrols as Ladybug, but even that only lasts about a week.

It was so perfect. The city had been stripped of him; his face was nowhere to be found. Every last advertisement had been taken away. She could be free of his ghost for a precious few hours. The city has been calm with no akumas popping up at all recently. She could spend her time with her best friend, her partner, the one person in the whole world who knows her just like she does him. The one person who doesn’t need a name to have her identity. She could let him help her heal.

She longs to tell him, to let him comfort her. She longs for those strong arms that wrap so gently around her, those soothing words that appear whenever she’s troubled.

In the years of their partnership, Marinette has grown close with Chat Noir. He has wriggled his way into the softer, more vulnerable parts of her, and she him. They talk about their lives now, less afraid of the peril of knowing each other. There is something unshakeable between them; something that started when they were still children and something that strengthens with every fist bump and hug and—most often now—peal of laughter. He still flirts and she still rolls her eyes, but they love each other now, and she has never been so sure of something in her life.

Which is why, when she doesn’t see him in seven days, anxious thoughts stick in her throat and steal her breath.

She dons her suit and races to the Eiffel Tower early that evening, ignoring the Chat in her head.

( _Miss me, LB?_ )

In early summer it is still light late in the evening, but the sun is well up in the sky when Marinette lands on its metal beams. She paces on one of the beams, their usual seat. The place she has been waiting for him all these nights. She has sent him message after message and called him goodness knows how many times, and she hasn’t received one reply.

So she’d given him three days to get back to her. Now those three days are up and—nothing. Not a peep.

Where could he be?

 _Would you like me to be closer,_ ma Lady _?_ he says in her mind.

She sends a fist into one of the criss-crossing beams with a snarl, trying to banish his playful words from her thoughts.

“This is _not_ the time, Chat,” she growls.

She is choking on the thought of something having happened to him. Because, really, that’s the only explanation. She knows it like she knows every edge of his grin. It is so completely against his nature to be like this, to not be here when the city needs him. When she needs him. He wouldn’t leave her without saying anything.

This is their promise: to be there for the city, and for each other. It has gone unspoken as time passed and they grew up and grew together. She has been there countless times to lift him up when his spirit falls and he has done the same. This was their _promise_.

A wild anxiety steals through her like venom until her body doesn’t fit right and her breaths come short and ragged. His name slips from her lips over and over as she swings clumsily from her perch to the next rooftop. Her thoughts are a flurry of concern and frustration and guilt.

She could have stopped this if she’d only let him reveal himself and see her true identity. He hasn’t brought the matter up in three years, but she’s sensed that that’s the one thing he’s longed for above most everything.

If she hadn’t been so _scared_ , so afraid of his disappointment, she could be helping him right now. What if he’s in serious danger? What if he needs her and she can’t find him because she doesn’t know him?

She calls for him uninhibited now, splashing his name on the walls of every building she passes by with a hoarse voice. Her worry sharpens and sharpens until it spills over into anger.

She will tear this city apart to find him. She will burn it down and scour the ashes.

A terrible, dooming feeling lodges in her gut. Maybe she’s too late. Maybe she’s too late to save him from whatever happened, just as she was too late to save Adrien.

She had to watch him die. She had to stand back helplessly as the world ripped him cruelly from his friends, his family.

And she’d only seen him twice. Once, with Nino and Alya during their allotted hour, and the shock of his injuries had been jarring. The second time, she’d slipped in under a mask and stolen barely five minutes of time with him. Tikki had somehow known she’d wanted to visit him without it though, and she’d lifted the transformation just as soon as Marinette’s feet had hit the floor. She had left him with a last plea for him to wake and pledge of love from his friends and a last soft kiss on the thin skin of his temple, before stealing away through the window again.

She refuses to be unable to see Chat Noir again.

But after hours of calling his name and searching for him, starting at every moving shadow and glint of neon green, Tikki’s presence in her mind urges her home. She carries her tired bones back to the terrace but she refuses to go back through the window, staying instead on the lounging chair and watching the night for him.

***

Marinette becomes a broken thing after that.

Her worry for Chat Noir only rubs viciously at the wound in her chest left by Adrien’s death. It doesn’t replace her anger, but it doesn’t lessen it either. She is a creature of worry and fury. The search for him consumes her. She wouldn’t even be going to school, if she could avoid it, but like some miracle, Alya is there every morning, gently pulling her from bed with her mother and waiting for her to slowly get ready for the day, even if it makes her late.

Marinette’s days are spent thinking of places he could be in class, her nights on the Paris skyline crossing those places off her mental map. He haunts the night’s darkness and she follows echoes of him into dead-ended alleyways and deserted carparks. Alya has tried to talk to her about it several times, but how can she explain? How can she explain the choking worry for her partner, her searing anger at the world for taking him from her too? She can’t, so she stays quiet. She uses grief as an excuse and it works. She buries her guilt of giving Alya another broken person to hold in her own broken heart. She uses Alya’s shoulder to cry on and she gives nothing away.

It feels like a betrayal, but that feeling doesn’t compare to the war that is ravaging the rest of Marinette, ripping her own heart to shreds.

In her silence on the matter, she tries to help Alya and Nino grieve, as best she can. Nino comes back to school but his schoolwork mirrors Marinette’s in its lack of progress. She doesn’t know how to help him. His anger doesn’t diminish.

Alya does better with him. Marinette tries to be there for Alya too, but it’s hard and she can feel herself stretching too thin. Alya was always the strongest of them all though. She is pulling through; slowly, achingly, but she’s pulling through.

A month passes with the three of them grieving in their own sore ways. A month of heartbreak that seems to just keep getting worse. A month of visiting a grave and leaving it feeling more rattled than comforted.

A month of searching and calling and crying for a best friend that doesn’t seem to be coming back. A month of a rage she can’t swallow, a rage she has resorted to taking out on criminals and petty gangs because Hawkmoth has disappeared. There are no akumas for her to work her frustrations out on.

Tikki doesn’t exactly approve of Marinette’s current behaviour in the red suit, but it’s the only thing that’s stopping her from curling into a ball and not moving ever again. She gets bruises now. Scratches appear on her face where her skin is exposed. Her fighting is dirtier now, more offensive and she has learnt how to keep going with aching muscles (and a broken bone once, in her finger. It had healed quickly and Marinette suspects Tikki’s magic). She doesn’t win every fight now.

The Ladyblog still manages to report it, this new vigilantism from Ladybug. The articles are even more detailed now, and Marinette knows that this is all that’s saving Alya right now, so she doesn’t lash out when she hears the click of a camera like she so desperately wants to. This is not the Ladybug she is proud to be. But in all the parts of her she has left, she can’t find it in her to care.

After all, the Ladyblog is the only news outlet that is reporting on the missing Chat Noir, where the rest of them seem to be staying away from it. Like they’re afraid of her or something.

The lighter side of the city has learnt to turn away from the sound of Ladybug’s hopeless calls for her partner and the darker side has learnt to fear her. It is her that leaves destruction in wake now.

Marinette has never in her life felt so tired. Sleep still mercilessly denies itself to her and food is becoming something that she hardly remembers anymore. She is plagued with memories of both Adrien and Chat Noir that cut to the bone each time.

Chat’s voice still echoes in her head. Every day, no matter what she’s doing, he’s there. Haunting her, taunting her. She has to keep from putting her fist through the wall a lot of the time.

Tikki tries her best to take care of her charge, and Marinette truly appreciates it, but there is no time for rest while Chat Noir is missing. One night, however, Tikki refuses.

Marinette didn’t know she was able to that. Anytime before, Tikki has been sucked into the ring seemingly without a choice, so it takes her a few seconds to understand what’s happening.

“What?” she says dumbly, blinking at the kwami.

“I can’t let you destroy yourself like this, Marinette,” Tikki says. She stares at her in earnest, big blue eyes full of concern.

A tired irritation flushes in Marinette’s cheeks. “I’m—I’m not—” What? Not destroying herself? It’s exactly what she’s doing, but that’s not the problem. Tikki clearly just doesn’t understand that— “Chat is _missing_ , Tikki. I have to find him, I can’t give up on him. He wouldn’t give up on me.”

“Marinette you don’t sleep, you hardly eat—how do you expect to find him like this?”

The irritation flares to anger. “I don’t matter! He matters. He is everything that matters, and I need to find him. _Spots. On._ ”

“No.”

“Tikki. _Please_.”

Tikki turns resolutely away. Marinette is shocked for a moment. How could Tikki do this? Abandoning her in her time of need, in _Chat Noir’s_ time of need. There has never been a time that he’s needed her more.

“Fine,” she snarls. “I’ll do this without you.”

“Marinette—”

Marinette tears the cardigan off the back of her chair, ready to leave, when a tinkling stops her. She looks down to the ground to see a silver ring.

Adrien’s ring.

She’d forgotten.

She lowers to her knees and scoops it up in trembling hands. She can’t believe she’d forgotten. Of all the days she could have left it on his grave, could have given it back.

The tears that never seem to be far from falling anymore spill over and she accepts Tikki’s warm comfort against her cheek as she kneels on the floor and tries to keep her chest from caving in.

No matter how many times she’s told herself, his death always seems to come as a new realisation every day. It bowls her over, knocks the breath out of her, snatches the ground under her feet. Every time she sees something that he’d touched in his life, it’s like a new wound. Her whole body is riddled with the holes he’s left and soon enough she won’t have anything left to give.

She closes a fist around the ring until it cuts into her skin and her sobs give way to a more exhausted stream of constant tears. She opens her palm again to look at it, stroking the metal that has warmed a little in her grip.

She slips it on, wishing to feel something alive in it, something that might soothe her.

His fingers always seemed so much bigger and stronger than hers, so when it fits like magic, she’s a little surprised.

Until of course a tiny black cat with the the most familiar green eyes materialises before her.

_Chat Noir._

“Kid!” it gasps, swivelling around wildly, taking in its unfamiliar surroundings.

It zips around the room until—

“Plagg.”

It’s Tikki who speaks. Marinette watches in fragile wonder as she zooms over to the cat and wraps her arms around him.

“Tikki!” he says, pushing her away a little. “Adrien, he—”

Marinette’s the one who speaks up this time. “He’s gone.”

The words feel so strange coming from her own mouth, like a last resonance.

The cat—Plagg—turns his attention to her, his eyes roving over her tear-stained cheeks and slumped posture and the ring on her finger. He zeroes in on it.

“What are you doing? That’s not—How did you—”

“Plagg,” Tikki, sees again, more gently this time.

He shakes his little head at her and what’s left of Marinette’s heart aches for him. “No. Tikki, no. He was fighting back! I told him not to but he was fighting back! Oh, Tikki—”

Tikki wraps him in her arms around and he growls the same word over and over, “ _No._ ” Marinette searches her desk for a glass of water and one of Tikki’s cookies for him, needing to do something to help, to soothe. Every so often he says Adrien’s name, and it is maybe the sixth time she hears it that the penny drops.

_Adrien. Chat Noir. Adrien._

The glass falls from her hand and shatters spectacularly over the floor. She hardly feels the wash of cold water soaking her socks. Her lungs shrivel.

He’s gone. All of him, he’s all… gone.

This time when she loses him, she feels it immediately.

It’s like that moment of realisation that comes after she thinks of a question she wants to ask him, no matter how insignificant, and then she sees he isn’t actually there, and that her question will go forever unanswered. She will never know and she will never see him smile when he speaks again. It’s that moment when she misses the next step and her foot falls through air. It’s that moment that crashes down on her again and again and again like it’s trying to pound the shape of loss into her. All over her it stamps the word _gone_ and she is helpless against the onslaught.

She can’t breathe. She needs to get out of the room that feels too small to contain her panic. She scrambles clumsily up the ladder to her bed, up and out the window.

Tikki somehow knows what she needs, and she doesn’t even have to speak the words before her suit is on and her yoyo is in her hand. She swings off the roof without pause and without an idea of where she’s going.

His voice whispers in the night and she follows it. She follows shadows until they lead her nowhere and another whisper of _ma Lady_ leads her to another place that he isn’t. She chases his ghost, unable to tell whether or not it’s real. Eventually she stops.

She ends up on the Eiffel Tower like some twisted comfort, and she collapses on their perch. The hard metal bruises her knees. Sobs claw their way up and out of her throat and her muscles quiver under the weight of her body and of her grief.

Thunder rolls across the sky, so loud it drowns everything out but the pounding of blood in her ears. Sharp drops of water bite cold on her skin as the heavens open and pour out the tears they’ve been holding for almost two months.

Marinette screams.

She screams her throat hoarse at her pain, at the injustice of it all. She is beaten and broken and every time it feels like it can’t get worse, fate laughs at her. There was no way for her to have guessed  how badly this would hurt, how deeply this would cut her. Weakness is not a word she should have used until this moment.

She cries for her lost boy and his wild smiles and safe limbs. She laments the nights when they would conquer the city together, and every night, he would conquer a piece of her. She misses the later nights when the rush of her blood in a fight would match the rush of her blood when he’d laugh. She misses his terrible humour, and his stupid puns, and all the annoying things that dug in under her skin but that she couldn’t help loving anyway.

Her brain unhelpfully throws a thousand images of him at her, in and out of the mask. The moments when both of them seemed to match and the moments when they were so very opposite. Hundreds and hundreds of flashes of gold and green and white and black and his _laugh_.

It is too soon. It is unfair. He was too young. She is too young. They are all too young to know something like this.

She never got to tell him she loved him. Not like she wanted to love him. She never got to tell him that every beat of her heart was like the sound of his name.

His words echo in her mind, the ones he would always say when she was upset.

_Hey. You have me. You will always, always have me._

How bitterly wrong he was.

She cries for the broken half he’s left behind. What is Ladybug without Chat Noir. Creation and destruction; they were balance. One is not without the other. The moon doesn’t shine without her sun.

How long she screams for, she doesn’t know. The crack in her throat is what stops her, the wracking coughs and the wretched crying. It’s still raining but the thunder has stopped and the only thing out of her body she can register is the silver, frozen light of the moon. It shines unsympathetically down on her and feels just as lonely.

She misses the sun. She misses its warmth, its colour, its life. She misses the sun like a ghost limb, sawn from her and shoved deep down into the ground where it doesn’t shine anymore.

For the first time since it happened, Marinette finds herself wishing for the ease of her first numbness. The way nothing hurt. She doesn’t want to feel like this. She wants her hollowness back.

She slumps over onto her side and squeezes her fists tight. The bite of metal on her finger reminds her that she still has on his ring. Plagg didn’t follow her. She presses it to her mouth, bruising her lips with its outline.

Her body aches but it’s not because of recent injuries. She lays there and tries to retreat so far into herself that she doesn’t feel a thing, letting the rain relieve her physical pain. Tikki’s presence seems to strengthen as she tries to silently comfort her. Soon she’s able to breathe okay and the pain she isn’t able to push away is throbbing in her chest more than spiking. She wants to stay where she is forever, but Tikki’s presence is urging her home, so she rises on wobbling legs and makes her slow way there.

She can barely feel her own limbs and there a lot of close calls on the edges of roofs and window ledges. Tikki comes to her aid more often than not and Marinette sometimes sees her hand moving almost of its own accord. A nudge here, a step there, and she arrives on her own terraced roof, exhausted.

She slips through the window and out of her suit. She looks to Tikki, who nods.

“Plagg?” she whispers, her voice gone.

He floats over from the window sill, a snarl set in his mouth. He doesn’t speak.

She holds her hand out to him and he softens, a little. He gently pulls it from her finger and curls himself protectively around it, returning to the window without looking at her.

***

They know.

Alya figured it out pretty quickly. With Ladybug’s strange behaviour and Chat Noir going missing, combined with Marinette’s deteriorating state, it wasn’t hard to piece together. That and apparently years of strange excuses and weird scenarios suddenly fell into place. She told Nino. This is what she tells Marinette one day at lunch, a couple of weeks later.

Marinette hardly reacts. What is there worth hiding now? They are a family, after all. She doesn’t have to ask if they will tell anyone—they won’t. She thinks of asking for forgiveness; for the lies, the secrets. Nino beats her to it.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” he says, as if he can read her mind. The exhaustion of a lifetime is still audible in his voice. “Our lives would be in danger and all that crap.”

Marinette snorts softly. “Yeah. All that crap.”

“Besides,” Alya says, nudging her with her elbow. “Now I can thank the girl who gave me an internship at _L’Humanité_ in person.”

Marinette shakes her head. “You got that on your own.”

“Nonsense. There’s no Ladyblog without Ladybug.”

They sit quietly for a moment, the next words looming in the air but no one wanting to say them. Marinette fidgets with the hem of her skirt.

“I’m so sorry,” Alya says, her voice soft. She takes Marinette’s hand.

Marinette just nods. She knows that if she talks she’ll cry so she stays quiet as Nino takes her other hand.

“This sucks,” he says.

Like a dam bursting, Marinette laughs. It’s shaky, and a few tears escape, but it feels so good just to have it acknowledged by them that she doesn’t care. For weeks she hasn’t been able to say it to anyone but Tikki, and it’s not the same. Tikki might be her friend, but she’s been around for thousands and thousands of years. Death is nothing new to her, nothing she can experience in quite the same, fresh way that Marinette can. Even if they don’t fully understand what she’s lost, Alya and Nino understand her, and that’s enough.

Alya pulls her into a hug and Nino throws his arm over the two of them.

“It really, really sucks,” Marinette says.

 _What an anticlimactic reveal, LB,_ he says in her mind. _You have none of my ‘dramatic flair’._

It’s hard, sometimes, to keep from completely breaking down.

***

Marinette knows what a mess is. She’s lived with messes her entire life, whether it be the mess of threads and fabric on her desk, or the mess of her sleeping schedule (especially after she became Ladybug). She’s familiar with the concept. She freely admits that that’s what she’s become.

Entirely unraveled.

Her days pass by in a blur. There’s a different kind of feel to the friendship between her, Nino, and Alya. They have a strange and broken support group full of terrible jokes and tears and delicious pastries, and it helps a little. Really. It’s not a cure, but it helps. She can tell by the way Nino can hold himself back from snapping sometimes, and how Alya has that sharply focused drive to her again. Marinette tries to drag herself up in her academics. Adrien’s name keeps moving further and further down in her list of recent recipients on her phone.

Ladybug still patrols the city, but she doesn’t call his name anymore. (Which name would she use anyway? Why would it matter?) The Paris nights are silent now. She doesn’t fight crime, her anger having abated a little. There are still no akumas, but the danger looms. She sits on the Eiffel Tower and she mourns.

So, yeah. She’s a mess.

But that’s natural. She is human after all. What’s shocking to see, is that Plagg is a mess too. Not in the rattled, mopey way, she is, but in a more prickly, snarling way. Marinette can hardly speak to him but for receiving a nasty, growling retort. If she didn’t understand what it is to hurt, she would have said something by now. Instead, she forgives him.

But he has seen death almost as much as the world has, and the question remains why he should be so affected.

She asks Tikki about it one day.

“Haven’t there been millennia of Chat Noir?”

Chat Noir answers in her head. _Yes, but we all know which one is your favourite._

 _You’re the only one I know, dumbass,_ she shoots back, well-used to his presence in her mind now.

Tikki nods, but she looks sadly at Plagg who still sits loyally on Marinette’s window sill, curled around his ring.

“Sometimes,” Tikki says, and her voice is so low Marinette has to slow her heartbeat to be able to hear, “and not very often, but sometimes, Plagg lets himself get more attached than he would like. He has this ridiculous policy that the less attached he is, the less it will hurt… But I think that just makes each exception that much worse. He loved Adrien. Really loved him.”

Marinette is silent for a while, letting the stab of loving Adrien die a little before she voices her next thought. It’s something that has been resting uneasy on her mind and it’s for this reason that she hasn’t asked Tikki about it. She’s not quite ready to give it up yet, this part of him. She won’t ever be ready, but she knows that this isn’t about her. It’s not within her right to hold onto it.

It still feels like it’s too soon, too close to forgetting about him.

“Do you…” she hesitates. “Should we give him back? To Master Fu?”

The dread in her voice surprises her.

When Tikki looks at her, it’s with a sad sort of pride. She knows how much this is hurting Marinette.

“You have a little more time. Soon.”

Marinette nods, and there’s a catch in her breath as tears prick her eyes. She supposes she’ll never be ready.

She tries to give Plagg his space, so it’s no wonder that with that and with her muddled thoughts, it takes her a couple of weeks to recall the words he’d said when he came out of the ring.

When the realisation comes to her that morning, the question burns at her the whole way through school. Dread rises in her as she begins to guess at what he might have meant. She races home at lunch time, stumbling over an “it’s complicated” to her friends.

“Plagg?” she asks when she bursts into her bedroom, out of breath not from running home, but more from her racing mind.

He doesn’t answer her from where he sits on the window, doesn’t move.

“Plagg,” she says again, voice harder. “This is important.”

Again he hardly stirs. It sparks an anger in her. She is too tired to be patient with him today; they are all grieving. She looks at Tikki but she just shrugs.

“Grow up, Plagg,” she growls. “I need your help.”

He opens an eye. “What do you know about growing up?”

“Enough to know that you’re supposed to be the bigger person.”

“Don’t bring me to the level of a mortal.”

“Plagg!” Tikki gasps.

He glares at Tikki. She glares back.

“Fine,” he bites. “What is it?”

Marinette takes a deep breath. “What did you mean when you said he was fighting back? Was Adrien fighting _someone_?”

Something like hurt flickers in Plagg’s eyes. He answers slowly, “Yes.”

Marinette waits.

And waits.

She raises an eyebrow at him.

“He was fighting Hawkmoth.”

So she was right. Why didn’t Adrien tell Ladybug? Why didn’t he wait for her?

“What happened?” she whispers.

She sees Plagg deflating entirely before her. Tikki zooms over to sit beside him. He fiddles with the ring,

“He found out who Hawkmoth was. It was an accident, something that was never meant to happen.” He pauses before looking right at Marinette. “His father. His father is Hawkmoth.”

The bitter feelings Marinette feels towards Gabriel Agreste are nothing compared to the acid that twists her stomach now. She feels sick.

“He saw him in that room he uses,” Plagg continues, his voice hollow. “Before I knew what was happening, he summoned the transformation. He tried to fight him, but he wasn’t thinking straight I could feel it. He didn’t want to hurt his father, and kept trying to plead with him to stop, to give up.”

The dread from earlier fills Marinette as he continues to talk. She can feel her breath sticking in her throat again. The images are clear in her mind. Adrien taking the defensive for once, trying to talk his father out of it. Taking blow after blow after blow and refusing to hurt his father. Fighting back, but only the bare minimum. Her heart throbs.

“Hawkmoth laughed at him. He laughed at him and gave him one chance to surrender. Adrien couldn’t do it. So his father threw him away, but he threw him too far. Adrien crashed right through the window. He could have saved himself. He knew it, I knew it. But he didn’t do a thing. Shock or something I guess. His transformation... released somehow. I don't know”

He stops and turns to look out the window. He doesn’t speak and Marinette is left with her own sense of shock.

The recount of his death has chilled her to the bone, the crash of glass echoing in her ears. She scrunches her eyes and tries to block it out, but the thoughts are coming in too fast and too numerous for her to stop them. For once though, she doesn’t hear his voice in her head. He has nothing to say.

Adrien hadn’t wanted to drag her into this, because it was his father. Did he think she would have hurt him? No, he couldn’t believe she’d be so cruel. What, then? Was he ashamed that it was his father? Did he think she’d think of him the same way, after everything they’d been through, with all that she felt for him, in and out of the mask.? He couldn’t.

She knew him better than she knew herself. She trusted him above anything else. They had a promise.

Anger pounds through her veins. Gabriel Agreste ripped that promise away. It was not enough for him to raise Adrien in a loveless home but when Adrien had found his own little home in his friends, he had to take that away too.

He had ripped Marinette’s world from under her feet, given her a grief that she shouldn’t know. For weeks and weeks

“I could have stopped him.”

Plagg’s voice is gruff.

“You couldn’t have done a thing, Plagg,” Tikki says.

He doesn’t say anything. Marinette walks over to the window sill and puts a shaking hand beside him.

“This was not your fault,” she tells him, a harsh fury in her voice.

She turns to Tikki who seems to understand at once. Marinette can tell she doesn’t like it.

“We have a duty to fulfil, Marinette,” she warns her. “We need to take his miraculous from him. That’s it.”

They both know Marinette’s lying when she nods her assent.

“Spots on.”

The transformation is hardly on before she’s turning to leave. The anger is a raging fire, an energy inside her that burns everything else out of her body.

It is only when her feet are out the door that she remembers Plagg. Her anger stutters for a moment when she sees his crumpled expression.

“Thank you,” she says through the lump in her throat, “For giving me my best friend.”

Her most beloved cat. Her partner.

***

Marinette takes the front door. She has not come here to hide from him. She slams into the entrance hall in a blaze of fury, ready to attack, but as soon as she enters, the fight leaves her in a rush.

This is still Adrien’s home.

It has always been quiet, but it was never so dead when Adrien was here. His smile was enough to warm the cold rooms. Now, it feels like a mausoleum. Her footsteps have always been quieter in the suit, but now the faint sound of them reverberates in the air. The emptiness echoes in the hole in her own chest.

The sun seems to refuse to shine its light on the place, and the entrance hall is dark.

She takes a tired breath. “Gabriel.”

It is almost too much to expect he will answer.

Suddenly, she’s apprehensive. This is the battle they have been leading up to for four years. It lacks all the drama she imagined it with in her mind. She and Chat Noir tried to predict it a hundred times. Nothing has come close to how it has ended up playing out.

It feels strange now that it’s all ending.

Something in her makes her slow down, delaying the inevitable. She doesn’t even know what she’ll say. How many times has she spoken to Mr Agreste as Adrien’s father, hated him for what he did as a father? Now to know him as Hawkmoth, as the man who has put her and Adrien’s lives in peril more times than she can count, it feels so strange. She knows this man behind the mask.

He’s her arch-nemesis. And he hasn’t even turned up to the fight.

She puts it off. She takes her time to wanders around the house, not particularly looking for him, knowing she’ll find him eventually, letting her emotions simmer. As ever, the mansion is spotless. Not a speck of dust, not a trace of dirt. It is more unsettling than pleasing.

Marinette looks at the hundreds of photos that decorate the clinical walls. In every room of the house, there he is, smiling down on her. Sometimes it’s just him, sometimes just his mother. Most of the time it’s both. She marvels again, for the hundredth time how much he looked like her.

 _You have her smile,_ they’d told one another once, unknowingly, when they were still children.

She still maintains that of the two, she was right. His smile is beautiful.

Beautiful enough to soften the edges of the severe building. How could such a beautiful boy have come from such an ugly home?

Her anger twists in her gut.

She saves the room she knows he’ll be in for last. It was inevitable, really. Poetic, almost. She searches a moment, for a calm so that she might end this with dignity, until she realises it doesn’t matter. It is perfectly reasonable for her to feel this way. There is no shame in her grief.

She doesn’t hesitate as she pushes open the door to Adrien’s room.

She’s only been in it a handful of times; Adrien never liked to be at home when he was with his friends. (Of everyone’s house he preferred the bakery. He never said it but he always adored the pastries, and Marinette could never deny him. He was always too thin.) It looks exactly the same as it always did: the climbing wall, the video games, the couch and TV, the bed, the computer desk that held an outrageous amount of computers. The very same but for the thick layer of dust that lies over everything.

He is standing at the great bay windows, looking out. She can tell from the disturbed space of dust on the floor that he was sitting there only a moment before, and that his legs are weak. His hands, clasped behind his back, are shaking.

Ever proud.

She hates him.

She resists the urge to throttle him, right then and there. She thinks of Adrien, only of Adrien, willing him to be as present as possible, if only in her head. This was supposed to be their fight. She’s doing this for him.

Tikki’s presence is anxious in her mind, but Marinette will not lose control.

He doesn’t turn his head toward her, but she can hear him take a breath, ready to speak. She decides the first words are not for him to take. This is not his match to monopolise. He lost that privilege when she lost her partner.

“Gabriel,” she says.

He knows what she’s doing. He turns. He almost smiles.

“I suppose you’re looking for this,” he says, holding up a small purple object. His voice is awful, scratchy and hoarse with disuse.

Marinette doesn’t answer him. If she speaks, she knows she will cry. She doesn’t want to cry in front of him. He doesn’t deserve to see it.

She walks over and takes the brooch. She doesn't see the kwami. She's careful to avoid grazing his skin, even as his hand shakes. She might be shaking from anger too, she can’t tell. She doesn’t meet his gaze.

Just as she curls her fingers around it, he grabs her wrist. She gasps, trying to pulls herself from his grasp, but his grip is iron.

“Let go of me,” she hisses, glaring at him.

“I need you to know I was doing it for her,” he croaks, eyes desperate. “For him, too. I didn’t mean to lose him."

Marinette wrenches her wrist away, breaking his hold. Fury burns in her.

“You didn’t lose him,” she spits. “ _I_ lost him. You. _Took._ Him.”

He flinches away from her, because he knows she’s right. He killed Adrien. He snuffed out the sun. She refuses to accept an explanation from him.

He knows better than to say something. She clenches her fists and tries to burn a hole through him with her glare. He stares back, not quite defiantly, but not submissively.

Ever. Proud.

She turns on her heel and storms to the door, leaving him with his guilt. There is nothing more she will do to him. Something on Adrien’s night stand catches her eye. The sight of it halts her anger. She walks to the night desk slowly, and when the tears come, she doesn’t stop them.

She picks up the good luck charm, and a song from long ago plays in the back of her head. One of quiches and video games, and brushing hands and puppy love. She catches her bottom lip between her teeth to stop it from quivering. Her heart wrenches.

Gabriel Agreste is staring at her, but she ignores him. This is not his. She doesn’t spare him a thought as she leaves. She thinks only of the boy with the sun in his smile and the whole world in his heart. She wraps this image around her like new armour, and she does not once look back.

The words that echo in her head now are also ones she's heard before.

 _Be seeing you,_ ma Lady.

***

Master Fu wipes the tears from her cheeks when she brings Plagg to him. She accepts his hug. She's relieved to give him the purple brooch.

***

A lot of time has passed, when she first sees the girl. New monsters have risen and fallen, and risen again.

Her warm brown skin and dark hair look strange against the black leather. Her smile is not quite as sharp. Her eyes are still green, but they are not as bright.

Marinette’s heart stutters in a lonely way. She takes a deep breath.

“How nice of you to drop by.”

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you thought! on [tumblr](http://lancmcclaine.tumblr.com) if you feel more comfortable talking to me over there


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